‘Abuse’ may not be accurate

The U.S. news media’s struggle over how to treat photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison raises two critical issues.

One of these -- the question of whether the harrowing images should have been published -- already has been engaged; the other -- whether the media themselves have helped create a climate of opinion that permits torture -- has yet to receive the exploration it deserves.

Two of the most forthright arguments against publication come from Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of the National Review Online, and Slate columnist Mickey Kaus. Goldberg not only condemns use of the photos but also argues that their release “and not the abuse” at Abu Ghraib led to the murder of Nicholas Berg, the American contractor beheaded by Islamic militants.

“The Abu Ghraib images are so shocking, so offensive and so sensational they will in all likelihood make America’s job in Iraq and the Middle East immeasurably harder for a long time to come,” Goldberg wrote this week. “That means more American deaths -- such as Berg’s -- more Iraqi deaths and a diminished future for that country and that region.”

Kaus asked, “Would it be a moral thing to do to print information that would very likely result in hundreds of deaths? The Abu Ghraib photo situation is very close to that one, except that the deaths are likely to be measured in the thousands and tens of thousands -- once all the Arabs and others who are enraged enough by the pictures to become ... anti-U.S. terrorists are finished with their careers.... If the only alternative were covering it up, then yes, covering up is sometimes the right thing to do.”

Clear, but not convincing.

The most reckless part of Goldberg’s argument -- the allegation that the photos’ release provoked Berg’s beheading -- is particularly unpersuasive. No such provocation was required by the Al Qaeda murderers who did the same thing to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Islamic fundamentalists have an atavistic fascination with beheading and, in all likelihood, Berg and Pearl were singled out for this savagery because they were Americans and Jews.

Kaus’ argument overlooks the fact that the Abu Ghraib mess is itself the product of governmental secrecy and coverup that goes back to Sept. 11’s immediate aftermath, a process abetted by media timidity and moral sloth. The notion that the antidote to evil committed in secret is more secrecy leads to a precipice, not a slippery slope.

From the outset of the just war against Al Qaeda and its allies -- and nothing that has occurred diminishes the justice of the cause -- the media have too complacently accepted the Bush administration’s assertion that it has the right to seize foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism at will and to hold them in secret unrestrained by the due process guarantees of either American or international law. The administration has insisted that it has the right to conceal the identities of its prisoners and has denied that they have rights to counsel or judicial review of their status or of the conditions of their incarceration and interrogation. The United States now maintains what is in essence a new Gulag Archipelago extending from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with an unknown number of shadowy outposts in between.

The media’s attempts to a look at what may be happening inside this secret system have been desultory and half-hearted. The efforts of those who have attempted to force the system open through the courts have received, at best, grudging coverage.

Worse, the media have opened themselves to a discussion of torture as if it were simply one choice among many. More than a year ago, when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan, the news media positively reveled in a weeklong discussion of the situation’s realpolitik implications: CNN polled its viewers on whether Mohammed should be tortured to find out what he knew. More than half said yes.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Mohammed was “not likely to provide information unless we use certain extreme measures.” In Dershowitz’s view, that’s why we need “a torture warrant.” There is, of course, no moral distinction between warrantless torture and the authorized sort. A notion of due process elastic enough to encompass a legal difference is somewhere on the other side of worthless.

The Wall Street Journal matter-of-factly quoted a “senior” federal law enforcement official’s prediction that “there’s a reason why [Mohammed] isn’t going to be near a place where he has Miranda rights or the equivalent. You go to some other country that’ll let you pistol-whip this guy.”

The New York Times calmly adjudged that Mohammed’s “detention also presents a tactical and moral challenge when it comes to the interrogation techniques used to obtain vital information.”

This week, the New York Times reported on how the government met that challenge. According to a story by James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis, “CIA interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as ‘water boarding’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.... Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture.”

The Times also reported that other “detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed.... Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.”

As we now know from the revelations about Abu Ghraib, some “detainees” there and, allegedly, in other places were deprived of their lives.

Torture requires not only secrecy but also euphemism. The mainstream media’s insistence on primly referring to what occurred in what was once Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prison as “abuse” is part and parcel of their deep avoidance of this story’s implications. Abuse is what happens when you fail to feed your parakeet or speak intemperately to a sensitive child. When you starve or drown or beat or sexually humiliate another human being, it is called torture. It’s what occurred in Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s Gulag, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Pinochet’s Chile, Hussein’s Iraq and -- now -- in the secret prison system the United States has constructed in defiance of its international obligations and our own laws and traditions.

There is no more insidious moral trap than the notion that immoral means can obtain a moral end. We have been told repeatedly since Sept. 11 that, if we fail to defeat Al Qaeda, a new dark age may descend.

The photos from Abu Ghraib suggest it already has.